Virtual Patient - Forms of Virtual Patients

Forms of Virtual Patients

Virtual patients may take a number of different forms:

  • Artificial patients: computer simulations of biochemical processes such as the effect of drugs in organisms, the physiologic processes of a given organ or entire systems (systems biology) in a given organism. These can be used in different phases of a compound or drug in development in a given pharmacological research as a preliminary to testing on animals and humans for the drug development processes.
  • Real patients: reflected in data e.g. electronic health records (EHRs). In this case the virtual patient is the reflection of the real patient in terms of data held about them. These are sometimes called e-patients.
  • Physical simulators: mannequins (sometimes spelled 'manikins'), models or related artefacts.
  • Simulated patients: where the patient is recreated by humans or computer-generated characters and Virtual Humans acting as such or engaging in other kinds of role-play.
  • Electronic case-studies and scenarios where users work through problems, situations or similar narrative-based activities.

Read more about this topic:  Virtual Patient

Famous quotes containing the words forms of, forms, virtual and/or patients:

    The necessary has never been man’s top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man’s greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)

    Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
    Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

    Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.
    Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)

    The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
    Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)